GUESTFS-TOOLS-RELEASE-NOTES-1.56(1)

📦
version 1.57.3 · 4 versions
, in centos-stream 10

💅 guestfs-tools-release-notes-1.56(1) — the virtualization-support glow-up

okay bestie, so this is the release notes page for the guestfs tools, sitting proudly in section 1 (Virtualization Support) of the manual. Consider this your group chat recap of everything that popped off. 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

guestfs-tools-release-notes — guestfs tools release Notes. yeah. that's the whole name. slay.

🌸 RELEASE NOTES FOR GUESTFS TOOLS 1.56 🌸

These are the release notes for the guestfs tools stable release 1.56, and they cover the major changes since 1.54. no cap, that's the whole assignment. 💖

Guestfs tools 1.56.0 was released on 9 July 2026. mark your calendar, bestie. 🗓️

🧚 virt-builder

  • Fixed the building of the "debian-13" template (pulsarrush). it works now, we love to see it. ✨
  • Now uses HTTPS to fetch templates (Xiang Hua Chen). secure vibes only. 🔒

💅 virt-customize

  • Fixed SELinux relabelling of "split /usr" guests. that one was lowkey cursed.
  • Fixed Windows Update and the "pnputil /e" command in Windows guests after virtio-win drivers are injected (Cole Robinson). 🩹
  • When injecting virtio-win drivers in Windows guests, now installs blnsvr.exe (the balloon server) (Cole Robinson). balloon server main character energy. 🎈
  • Fixed installation of Windows Vista and Windows 2008 Server R1 drivers (Cole Robinson). retro icon behavior.
  • Removed the RHEL subscription-manager feature (Cole Robinson). it's gone bestie, packing up its things.
  • In firstboot scripts, prints Windows "%USERNAME%" and "%USERDOMAIN%", which you can use to diagnose failures caused by insufficient permissions (Ming Xie). literally a little detective tool. 🔍
  • Windows firstboot scripts may now exit with code 250, which means no reboot is required after the script — the next script in sequence runs immediately (Srihari Parimi). skipping the reboot line iykyk. 🏃‍♀️
  • On Windows, a sentinel file is created after all firstboot scripts have run, which may be used to indicate that firstboot has completed. a little "we're done here" note. 💌

🦋 virt-inspector

  • Adds <windows_group_policy/> if Windows Group Policy was detected inside a guest. 👑
  • New <class> element, used to indicate the category of applications, such as antivirus.
  • For XFS filesystems, new <type version="4|5"> to indicate XFSv4 or XFSv5. (This is also displayed in virt-filesystems(1) output.) ok that's actually so useful.
  • Added support for Kylin, NeoKylin and Anolis Linux (grass lu). 🌏

🌈 virt-sysprep

  • Added a new operation to clean zsh history files (Fazle Arefin). your secrets are safe(ish). 🙈

💜 Common changes

  • Some bash completion scripts that were no longer used by guestfs-tools were removed. also new ./configure --with-bash-completion and ./configure --with-bash-completion-dir options were added (Christopher Byrne). out with the old, in with the flags. ✨
  • All tools taking a LUKS key file now allow a binary file to be used. 🗝️

📚 Documentation

  • Documentation about running virt-builder guests now uses the qemu option -cpu max. 🖥️
  • All information related to firstboot scripts was moved to and consolidated in "FIRSTBOOT" in virt-customize(1) (Srihari Parimi). one place, one truth. 💖
  • Removed a lot of obsolete documentation in the virt-sysprep(1) man page. spring cleaning fr fr. 🧹

🔧 Build changes

  • Fixed Weblate (i18n) web hooks (Rafael Fontenelle). 🌍
  • Fixes for OCaml 5.
  • Added github CI (Cole Robinson). green checks are a love language. ✅
  • Removed the "AM_GNU_GETTEXT" macro and replaced it with simpler "LIBINTL" checks (Cole Robinson).
  • Now builds the Bison-based parser with -Wno-yacc to reduce yacc compatibility warnings that we don't care about (Cole Robinson). silence the haters. 🤫
  • Various build warnings were cleaned up (Cole Robinson). ✨
  • "CFLAGS" is now prepended to the default, allowing default flags to be overridden. In addition, -fPIC is added to the default flags (Cole Robinson).
  • Many memory leaks identified by Claude Code were fixed (shivanayak). leaks found, leaks bodied. 💀

🧠 Internals

  • OCaml quoted string literals ("{|..|}") are used throughout the code to make it easier to include verbatim scripts, code, regexps etc. so clean. 🎀
  • The sources for virt-cat(1), virt-filesystems(1), virt-log(1), virt-ls(1) and virt-tail(1) previously used a single source directory (cat/) for no particular reason. These were moved to separate directories. okay "for no particular reason" is sending me 😭

🐛 Bugs fixed

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

http://libguestfs.org/ — go click around bestie, the lore is all there. 🦋

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

these absolute legends:

  • Christopher Byrne
  • Cole Robinson
  • Fazle Arefin
  • Fco. Javier F. Serrador
  • pulsarrush
  • Rafael Fontenelle
  • Richard W.M. Jones
  • Srihari Parimi
  • Temuri Doghonadze
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Copyright (C) 2009-2026 Red Hat Inc.

📜 LICENSE 📜

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.

(translation: it's free, share it, but no promises and no warranty — read the actual license, bestie. 💜)

🐞 BUGS 🐞

To get a list of bugs against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

To report a new bug against libguestfs, use this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization+Tools

When reporting a bug, please supply:

  • The version of libguestfs.
  • Where you got libguestfs (eg. which Linux distro, compiled from source, etc)
  • Describe the bug accurately and give a way to reproduce it.
  • Run libguestfs-test-tool(1) and paste the complete, unedited output into the bug report. (complete and unedited, bestie — do not trim it, do not vibe-edit it. 🙏)
genuinely do not skip that last one, the unedited output is the whole point. 😭

and that's the tea! ☕ this page came from guestfs-tools 1.57.3, dated 2026-09-16 — so yeah, the manual itself is a whole version ahead of the 1.56 notes it's shipping. mwah, bye bestie! 💖✨🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from